Yahoo’s Luke Beatty said he is not worried.
“We welcome the change,” he insisted about Google taking aim last Friday at so-called “content farms,” producers of low-quality content that spam up the Web and the search giant’s results. “And we endorse what Google is doing 100 percent.”
That’s ironic, given among those allegedly hit hardest by the tweaking of its famous algorithm–based on early, and perhaps questionable, surveys–is Yahoo’s Associated Content.
Its founder talked to BoomTown about the impact.

In another significant search announcement yesterday, Google said it was revising its algorithm to target makers of low-quality content.
Perhaps I’m being cynical, but the noisy search algorithm changes, while welcome to those using Google, also have a pretty clear goal to burnish the Silicon Valley company’s image.

Here’s a blog post that Demand Media put up in response to Google’s announcement last night that it would prune low-quality content from its search results.
Is Demand its target? The newly public company begs to differ.

Google Inc. has penalized Overstock.com Inc. in its search results after the retailer ran afoul of Google policies that prohibit companies from artificially boosting their ranking in the Internet giant’s search engine.

The antitrust investigation Google is facing in Texas is quite a bit broader than originally thought. A civil investigative demand sent last July by the office of Attorney General Greg Abbott, and first reported by Bloomberg, reveals an inquiry not just into ad pricing, but site ranking and “the manual overriding or altering of” search results as well.

Google has begun preliminary talks with European Union regulators in an effort to resolve an antitrust investigation that began in November, according to a source cited by Reuters today. The probe was launched after competitors charged that Google was using its dominant position in search to favor its own services in its result rankings.

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